Oh look, it's 2012

Happy New Year, one and all; I hope it's a good one for you and yours, and better than 2011. We had a good, if quiet Christmas and New Year, sharing it with Elanor and Sally. Elanor has a new work contract starting on the 9th, so has a week off this week, handy for us to get various items delivered to her house, like the big Julian Graves order that arrived today.

Sally's cut paw pretty well healed before New Year, but she then got a splinter of flint in the other forepaw, which necessitated some digging out, so she's presently going round with a blue booty on that side when out. Elanor had to enlist the help of Jackie from Capable Canines to deal with it; Jackie is really good and helpful that way, and saved Elanor a fortune in vet's fees by digging out the splinter and dressing the wound with gauze, cotton wool and vet wrap, aka cohesive bandage.

We've been plodding on with our books; mine is very nearly ready to publish, but still needs some polishing. I must get back into the routine of doing a bit of work on it every day.

Yesterday, we had a visit from Bill and Eileen from New Dawn, together with Stephen and Jayne from Dolce Far Niente. Bill trimmed Sheila's hair for her, and I served a large lasagne with garlic bread and salad to the gang. Jayne had brought an enormous apple crumble to follow, together with a choice of Greek yogurt or double cream to put on it, so it was a merry party all round, the biggest bit of socialising we've done all holiday, in fact.

The boat has continued to behave itself, mostly, though the display on the Hurricane remote switch has gone out again. I thought I'd give Peter Mason at Braidbar a quiet week to get back into the swing of things after the break, and then get onto him about this (and about permanently resolving the battery issue) next week.

I'm quite drawn to the idea of the radical solution to this last, that is, get him to reconstruct the engine bay to move the Hurricane aft onto the swim, and place the battery bank forward in the usual Braidbar position. This is how he did it on Dolce, so it should be feasible for us, possibly with some restructuring of the things like the engine exhaust.

Here's a photo of the arrangement in Dolce, courtesy of Stephen Pigott:

Hurricane at the back, batteries in front

If it looks a bit dusty in there, that's because it was taken during the build; I can testify that Stephen keeps his engine bay a lot tidier and cleaner than that. His seafaring days may be behind him, but that's no reason to let standards drop.

/nobigdeal